Carol Vorderman

https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1835377554514981252

A rather disappointing performance from Carol Vorderman on an LBC chat-show.

I like Carol Vorderman, some of her posts in the run-up to the 2024 General Election, exposing the hypocrisy and malfeasance of the then Conservative Government were quite brilliant. This, however, was a shabby and lazy performance. Okay, we all fall short sometimes, but it is best to acknowledge our errors. Instead, Carol played the victim and whined about the volume of critical traffic on Twitter.

Caller Neil was complaining about the current state of the family court system; it would seem that he had some experience with that system. He went on to say “that society has a lot of contempt for men – there’s a quote from Jordan Peterson…..” at this point Carol Vorderman shaking her head says “No, no, no, no, no… I’m not having that on my show.” Now, merely mentioning the name of Jordan Peterson is enough to get you cut off in mid-sentence and he is to be lumped together with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. I disagree with much that JP says, in particular, his views on climate change. However, I don’t think he is so far from the mainstream that Carol should have cut Neil off immediately as if he had uttered some kind of profanity.

Carol Vorderman could have gone on to explore Neil’s experiences with the family court system and the reasons for his wider beliefs about the position of men in society. Her failure displayed a lack of empathy and curiosity. What exactly was his bad experience with the family courts? Could he expand on his reasons (in fact well founded) for believing society is tilted against men? Sadly she didn’t and as a result, Carol, Neil and the listeners were the poorer for that.

The belief that society is tilted against men has good academic foundations. Cory Clark of the University of Pennsylvania has written well on this subject pooling a large number of studies that all point to a pro-female bias among men and women that is more strongly expressed in women. Here are a few examples,

Basic Index of Gender Inequality

The Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) has been criticised for only focusing on issues that affect women and even then, scores that appear to show male disadvantage are truncated. When you remove these biases and measure across three domains, health, educational attainment and life satisfaction a different picture emerges. In socio economically advanced countries such as the UK women are doing better than men – see figure below.

Moral typecasting: women are assumed to be victims and men perpetrators.

A study by Tania Reynolds et al looked at several scenarios and showed that women were more easily seen as victims. For example, a female employee claiming harassment was seen as more of a victim than a male employee making a claim in identical circumstances. Also, female victims were assumed to experience more pain from an ambiguous joke. Most disturbing to me was that managers were seen as less moral when firing a female employee than a male employee even when the underlying circumstances were the same. In short, in studies involving 3,137 participants in four countries, harm evaluations were systematically swayed by the targets’ gender.

People care more about female underrepresentation in careers

Research by Katherina Block et al, showed that the public is more concerned about gender imbalances in male-dominated professions than it is about imbalances in female-dominated professions. In addition, when the career in question comes with a high salary people were more likely to suggest that barriers were blocking the entry of women.

Women are punished less severely than men for the same crime

A meta-analysis of experimental research on mock juror assessments found that it was advantageous if the defendant was female, physically attractive and of high socioeconomic status. These data are consistent with ‘real world’ findings from the United Kingdom where men are twice as likely to be imprisoned for a violent first offence whereas women were twice as likely to receive a conditional discharge or suspended sentence .

Research claims favouring women are more likely to be believed than those favouring men

William Von Hippel and David Buss showed that psychologists were more likely to believe claims that women could have evolved to be more verbally talented than men than they were to believe men evolved to be more mathematically talented than women (here).

Steve Stewart-Williams found a similar effect. When 492 participants were presented with essentially the same study showing that men/women draw better, or men/women lie more, both men and women were more likely to believe the study that favoured women (here).

Similar findings come from another scientific report where fictitious studies relating to male and female intelligence were presented. Participants viewed studies that purported to show the sexes were of equal intelligence or that women were of greater intelligence as being more credible than those that appeared to favour men(here).

Cory Clark and Bo Winegard showed that among academics in the United States and the United Kingdom there is a stronger desire to censor science that disfavours women compared to men (here)

Women have an advantage in hiring decisions in STEM subjects.

A common trope among feminists is that women have to be twice as good as men to get the same job. So where does the evidence point? As usual, it points in the opposite direction.

A study of hiring faculty in STEM subjects showed a substantial preference for hiring women over identically qualified men and the claim that weaker men were promoted over more able women was not supported(here). Another study found a 2:1 preference for hiring women on a STEM tenure track across 370 universities in the USA(here).

Okay, I have just picked a few studies. What I want to establish is that there is a respectable case to be made that society is tilted against men and boys. Carol didn’t have to agree, she might even have had some better arguments, though I doubt it. What Carol Vorderman and LBC should do now is ring caller Neil, apologise and have the mutually respectful conversation that they should have had.

Perhaps this is also a story of feminist censorship. In Feminism: Building the Rhetorical Fortress I argued that censorship is an important weapon of feminism. In academia female academics are twice as likely as their male peers to favour shutting down opinions they disagree with. For example, the institute policy studies found that female academics were twice as likely to discriminate against a job application from a fellow academic who supported Brexit.

Similarly, female academics were more likely to favour censoring a study that was objectively true but might cause upset to an identity group. As Helen Dale has observed, writing in CapX, ‘women are systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than are men. As institutions, including universities, have become more feminised, they have become more hostile to freedom of expression and thought.’

Perhaps Carol Vorderman’s actions were part of the same intolerant culture.